Historians, homilists, orators, poets and magazine poets have for ages
been justly extolling the love of country as one of the noblest of
human sentiments; and it has been officially recommended to the fair
members of the Women’s Press Association as an appropriate subject to
write about—as “the vanity of life” was by the good-natured traveler
suggested to the inquiring hermit as a suitable theme for meditation.
Through all the ages has sounded the praise of patriotism, the love of
country. Philanthropy, the love of mankind, is a modern invention—a
newfangled notion with which it is unprofitable to reckon.
But while the love of country has been so generally and so justly
extolled, too little has been said in praise of that still more highly
concentrated virtue, the love of county. This noble sentiment is even
more nearly general (where there are counties) than the other. That
it is a stronger and more fervent passion goes without saying. The
natural laws of affection are extremely simple and commonplace. The
human heart has a fixed and definite quantity of affection; no two
have the same quantity, but in each it is definite and incapable of
augmentation. It follows that the more objects it is bestowed upon, the
less each object will get; the more ground it is made to cover, the
more thinly it must be spread out. A woman, for example, cannot love a
child, five dogs, a Japanese teapot, _The Ladies’ Weekly Dieaway_,
an exquisite shade of lavender and a foreign count any harder than, in
the absence of the other blessings, she could love the child alone.
Similarly, the man whose patriotism embraces the ninety millions of
Americans, Americanesses and Americanettes can care very little for any
one of them; whereas he whose less comprehensive heart takes in the
inhabitants of only a single county must, especially in the sparsely
settled districts, be comparatively enamored of each individual. It
is this that gives to parochialism (it has not been more definitely
named) a dignity altogether superior to that of the diffused sentiment
which the historians, the homilists, orators, poets and newspaper poets
have united in belauding, not without reason, though, in the case of
those last mentioned, commonly without rhyme. In the love of county
the gifted ladies of the Women’s Press Association would find a theme
surpassed in sublimity by but one other, namely the love of township.
Of that sacred passion no uninspired pen would dare to write.